The Prisoner of St Kilda: The True Story of the Unfortunate Lady Grange

By Margaret Macaulay

In the 18th century shotgun weddings were not unusual, but in most cases it wasn't the bride that was holding the gun. So began the stormy marriage between Lord and Lady Grange, a marriage which was to end with Lady Grange's death on the Isle of Skye after 13 years in exile.
The daughter of a convicted murderer, Lady Grange's behaviour, such as her fondness for drink, was so outrageous that her sudden disappearance from public life was not considered surprising. But few knew the true story of her disappearance.
This book reveals, for the first time, how the unfortunate lady was violently kidnapped and transported to the remote islands off the west coast of Scotland, spending seven years on the island of St. Kilda. Condemned to a very different lifestyle than she had enjoyed in Edinburgh, and baffled by the strange tongue of the Gaelic West, she still obstinately survived, finally dying in Skye in 1745.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Luath Press
• Release date: Jun 7, 2010
• ISBN: 9781910324110

Margaret Macaulay

Margaret Macaulay was born in Campbeltown, Argyll, in 1934 and educated at Campbeltown Grammar School. She graduated from Glasgow University in 1956 with an M.A. Hons. in History. She worked on The Herald as a freelance journalist, a teacher and as a bookseller.

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PREFACE

A Strange Coupling

The true story of this Lady is as frightfully romantic as if it had been a fiction of a gloomy fancy.

Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, James Boswell

IT WAS INDEED a strange coupling. James Erskine and Rachel Chiesley, Lord and Lady Grange, were uneasy bedfellows even at the best of times – which is hardly surprising if you give credence to contemporary gossip that he had been forced to marry her at the point of a gun, pressed to his head by the lady herself, and that she kept a razor handy under her pillow to remind her fickle husband of her tempestuous nature and her lineage as the daughter of a convicted murderer.

Yet who would blame Lady Grange if she eventually considered herself the wronged party? An imperious lady, she felt keenly her exclusion from the management of her husband’s estate when he began to spend increasing amounts of time in London. Even more wounding was the knowledge of a mistress in the south.

As the relationship deteriorated James found his own unique solution. Making use of a mafia of male friends who shared with him an interest, to put it no higher, in the seditious business of Jacobitism, he arranged for the permanent removal of his wife. On 22 January 1732 Rachel was abducted from her lodgings in Edinburgh. Sentenced without trial, she spent the next 13 years on a variety of Scottish islands, the greater part of that time on St Kilda, the ultima Thule of Scotland.

Lady Grange never did succeed in returning home or seeing her family again. Nine long years would elapse before any communication at all from her would arrive in Edinburgh to alert her friends to the fate that had befallen her. Although a rescue ship was hurriedly organised, it was doomed to fail. Her captors, secure in their own familiar territory, would always be one step ahead of any attempt at rescue. Lady Grange was hastily removed from St Kilda in the winter of 1740–41, taken to a safe house in Assynt, then to Harris, and finally to Skye where she died in May 1745.

To our modern way of thinking James Erskine’s solution to his marital problems may appear barbarous and cold-blooded. After 25 years of marriage and nine children, Rachel was simply erased from Edinburgh society and removed from its civilised comforts. Why was she treated so savagely? Did she in any way deserve her fate? Her story is so tragic in human terms, so intriguing in its intermesh with the politics of the period that it clamours to be re-examined. A visit to the National Portrait Gallery seemed a sensible first step to take in my journey to discover the true story of the celebrated and unfortunate Lady Grange.

CHAPTER 1

The Cold Store

This matrimonial connection was far from agreeable to the Mar family and ultimately turned out in every respect unfortunate.

‘Memoir of Lord Grange’, James Maidment

IN THE COLD store the atmosphere was appropriately frosty as the gallery attendant pulled out one of the large support panels which accommodate temporarily unwanted portraits. Not only were the Granges in the same room but they shared the same panel. Eye contact had however been avoided since Lord Grange’s commanding full length portrait was occupying a sizeable part of one side of the panel, with Lady Grange’s more modest head-and-shoulders oval painting consigned to the other side.

Lady Grange was painted by John de Medina in 1710. She was then about 31 years old – although her actual date of birth is unknown, her baptism in Edinburgh is recorded on 4 February 1679, a ceremony which normally took place soon after birth. In her portrait she looks out at us with composure, a calm expression in the brown eyes, a hint of a smile about the mouth.

If the tempestuous nature of which she was regularly accused is true, Medina has failed to capture it. Her shoulder-length hair is dark and a few stray curls cross the forehead. Rachel Chiesley was considered something of a beauty in her early years, even by those who had little else good to say of her. Yet here too Medina fails to provide the evidence. The face is pleasant enough, but lacks any defining characteristic or any striking feature. There is a certain blandness to the portrait which puzzles and disappoints.

Lady Grange is wearing a rose-pink stole over a blue dress. The scoop neckline is edged with lace to demure effect. Perhaps the demureness was deliberate. Perhaps she was happy to promote the appearance of conformity and respectability, knowing how tongues had wagged only a few years earlier over her marriage to Lord Grange. And does the hint of a smile on her lips suggest the cat that has got the cream? After all this was 1710, the year when her husband, at the remarkably early age of 30, had been made Lord Justice Clerk of Scotland. Rachel Chiesley, whose father was publicly hanged in Edinburgh in 1689 for the murder of another law lord, had indeed achieved a remarkable success in society from a most ill-starred beginning.

On the other side of the hanging panel Lord Grange towers down, resplendent in his judicial red robes. At his side a table supports what are presumably some law books – legal knowledge literally at his slender, aristocratic fingertips.

Lord Grange’s portrait was painted by William Aikman in 1720 when its subject was 40 years of age. James Erskine, second son of Charles, Earl of Mar, owed much of his early and swift rise in the legal profession to the powerful position in Queen Anne’s government in London of his elder brother, John. This relationship would later turn out to be a mixed blessing, but while John was influential in London, James’s legal career in Scotland flourished. Called to the Scottish Bar in July 1705, he was raised to the Bench as Lord Grange only a year later. From 1710 to 1714 he was Lord Justice Clerk, losing this position only when his brother fell from favour with the accession of the Hanoverian George I.

Worse, however, was to follow. John, nicknamed ‘Bobbing John’ for his facility to change political allegiance, made the disastrous decision in 1715 to return to Scotland and attempt to revive the cause of the deposed Stuart monarchy. The Jacobite Rising was an abject failure and Bobbing John paid a heavy personal price. Defeat at the Battle of Sheriffmuir led to the forfeiture of the earldom and exile on the Continent. He attempted a reconciliation with George I and several petitions were made on his behalf, all unsuccessful. John died in exile in Aachen in 1732, held in suspicion by both the Hanoverians and the Jacobites.

James Erskine had acted as chief factor for the Mar estates in the good days while his brother was Secretary of State in London. Family loyalty and no doubt a certain self-interest motivated him to continue looking after the affairs of his brother in exile, although he was well aware of the danger of being himself tainted with suspicion of Jacobitism. No longer Lord Justice Clerk, he continued to act as a judge in the Court of Session in Edinburgh.

When Aikman was commissioned to paint his portrait Lord Grange was a prominent figure in Scottish society, sharing with his contemporaries an interest in religious discussion and the business of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. He was settled happily into family life, at least to surface view, with a country house at Preston, near Prestonpans, and a townhouse in the capital.

For both Grange and Aikman, as indeed for all the members of what constituted the chattering classes of 18th century Scotland, the Union of the Parliaments in 1707 was beginning to have an effect. Looking towards London as the centre of power and influence – which had begun in 1603 with the departure south of the Scottish king and court – accelerated after the Union. Aikman himself was on the point of moving to London when Grange’s portrait was painted.

James Erskine still foresaw his future in Edinburgh in 1720. Fourteen years would pass before he would begin to think seriously of a political career at Westminster, by which time he would have ‘solved’ the problem of a troublesome wife. Of more immediate concern to James was the need to look after the Erskine family interests in the absence of brother John without himself becoming suspected of sedition.

In the Aikman portrait Lord Grange stands comfortably shod in black, square-toed shoes with sensible, sturdy heels. He has the air of a man who knows how to tread a line without losing his balance. It would indeed be a pity if such a spotless pair of shoes, so symbolic of a successful lifestyle, were to be caught straying into undesirable company. Mud sticks, even to the shiniest of shoes.

CHAPTER 2

Murder in the Royal Mile

The character of the Assassin was shown by his demeanour when he was apprehended. On hearing that his victim had almost instantly expired, he declared, with savage exultation, that ‘he was not used to do things by halves.’

An Account of the Assassination of Sir George Lockhart, Hay’s Manuscript, 1700

ALTHOUGH RACHEL CHIESLEY was only ten years old when her father, John Chiesley of Dalry, was convicted of murder and hanged in full view of the Edinburgh populace, the sins of the father were never entirely forgotten and were revisited whenever it suited anyone to denigrate the daughter. Chiesley was a man with a low flashpoint, quick to take to the law even against his own family, and quick to take the law into his own hands. If it had not already been appropriated by his native country, ‘Wha daur meddle wi’ me?’ might have been minted as his motto.

His marriage to Margaret Nicholson had been an unhappy one, finally ending in separation. Margaret took him to court for maintenance for herself and their ten children – there is a suggestion that the children were starving – and at the final court hearing Sir George Lockhart of Carnwath, Lord President in the Court of Session, found against Chiesley, awarding Margaret alimony of 1,700 merks – approximately 93 pounds Scots per annum. Chiesley, incandescent, accused Lockhart of having taken the government of his family from him and threatened that, in the absence of ‘a speedy remedie’, he would attack Lockhart ‘either in kirk or mercat’.

Lockhart’s failure to take this threat seriously was a fatal mistake. He was shot by Chiesley as he walked home from church on Easter Sunday, 31 March 1689. The murder took place in the High Street in the presence of several witnesses, including the victim’s brothers.

The High Street and the Canongate form the greater part of what is popularly known as the Royal Mile, linking Edinburgh Castle at its head with the royal residence of Holyroodhouse at its foot. In summer its pavements are thronged with tourists and during the Edinburgh Festival a section of the street is pedestrianised to give performance space for human statues, jugglers, and hopeful young thespians in costume pressing flyers into the hands of passers-by. But on that March day in 1689 the street theatre was for real. No one was acting and no one had read the script beforehand.

Sir George Lockhart of Carnwath (c.1630–1689).

Richard Augustin Hay has left us a vivid account of the assassination and the events leading up to it. It would appear that Chiesley had been stalking his victim. In a manuscript penned eleven years after the events described, Hay writes that the day before the murder Chiesley had been seen following Lockhart from the Duke of Hamilton’s apartments at Holyroodhouse. The next day, outside the New Church (one of the smaller churches contained at that time within St Giles Kirk), Chiesley had offered money to the ‘bedler’ for a place in the seating area belonging to Lord Castlehill, the Lord President’s brother, which would have positioned him strategically just behind his intended victim.

It is hard to credit that Chiesley actually intended to shoot Lockhart while he was at worship in a crowded church, yet that does seem to have been his intention. Yet, informed that the particular seat he wanted was not available, Chiesley refused any other, reportedly pacing up and down till the sermon was over and walking out of the church ahead of Lockhart. He then stationed himself at the close entrance which he knew led down to the Lord President’s house.

Edinburgh’s Old Town was a crowded rabbit warren of wynds and closes leading off from the Royal Mile. High life and low life co-existed there, often sharing the same tenement stair, with the lower orders occupying the less salubrious apartments. There was a degree of social intercourse which would be lost when the upper classes decamped to the Georgian splendours of the New Town.

As well as the tenement ‘lands’ so characteristic of the Old Town, substantial townhouses were tucked away down the various closes and wynds. Lockhart lived in such a townhouse in Hope’s Close, a short distance up the High Street from St Giles. He was accompanied on what would be his last walk home by his two brothers, Lord Castlehill and Daniel Lockhart.

We learn from a letter the Earl of Errol received a few days after the murder from a correspondent in Edinburgh, that the brothers discussed the sermon they had just heard delivered by Dr William Hay, Bishop of Murray and that the Lord President discoursed all the way about the sermon, asserting that ‘he had nevir heard tell of so excellent a preacher before’. Yet it would have been strange if the conversation had not eventually turned to the subject of the political upheaval which was then convulsing both Scotland and England. William of Orange had landed in Devon the previous November and since Christmas King James ii of England and VII of Scotland had been in exile in France, never to return to either country again. On 13 February William and Mary had been proclaimed joint sovereigns in London. The English had decided: the English Revolution was over.

Scotland still hesitated. Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee, had been in Edinburgh earlier in the month before riding north to raise support for James. Even now, as the Lockhart party progressed up the High Street, the Castle at the top was still holding out for James. Scotland would decide on the 4th of April and the Scottish crown would be offered to ‘the Prince and Princess of Orange, now King and Queen of England’; by which time, both Lockhart and Chiesley would be dead.